At any rate, I thought Friend Fehringer’s proposition over all afternoon at my desk, and couldn’t see myself being such a dastard as he proposed, not for anything in the world. How could I possibly look myself in the eye ever again, having betrayed a kindness in such a manner? For it was, truly, Tom Stanton S-sub two who had given me my start in this rewarding (sic) profession.
On the Lex local, straphanging, between 51st Street and Grand Central, I thought it over some more. And subtly, without my really noticing it at all, my thinking began its insidious change. My thoughts were still in opposition to Fehringer the Ferret, but my reasoning had metamorphosed. Now, I was thinking: What if Fehringer doesn’t get away with it? After all, Tom Stanton is S-sub two, no easy man to diddle. Wouldn’t my smart move be to avoid the issue entirely? Thus remaining both morally pure and occupationally safe.
Walking underground from the Lex local to the 42nd Street shuttle, my busy brain turned to contemplation of the Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti account. Was that an occupation, after all, worthy of safeguarding?
Wedged amid the snarling weasels on the cross-town shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square, I thought about Fehringer’s job. I might, could possibly have that job myself, if Fehringer bootstrapped (or bootlicked, or booted) himself upward. With its increments, ah, yes. One could taxi homeward, lollygagging in blissful solitude in acres of back seat, whilst the taxi driver did all the sweating and snarling in one’s stead.
Traversing the tile-walled corridors from shuttle to 7th Avenue Express, and riding that Profane Comedy southward, I began to see the justice of Fehringer’s proposal. He was absolutely right actually. Tom Stanton was a rather heavy boozer. He’d been glowing rather brightly, in fact, when he’d met and hired me. Feral Fehringer was undoubtedly accurate in his claim that he had been carrying the ball for Tom Stanton lo these many moons. Name and game, indeed and exactly. A ball carrier in need is a ball carrier indeed. And I was surely worthy of promotion myself. Hadn’t my earnest efforts on behalf of Italian clotheslines been met with universal and unequivocal approval among the higher-ups?
By the time I made the change at 14th Street from the express to the local, I had made another change as well, and somewhat more significant. What, I was currently asking myself, had Tom Stanton really done for me after all? Hired me to the mailroom, that was what, something any personnel manager or employment agency in the business could have done just as well. And what had Furtive Fehringer done for me? He’d rescued me from the mailroom and started my upward climb via Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti, for number one. And he’d offered me a helping hand to climb yet another rung of the ladder of excess. Fehringer the bellringer. Put your money on Fraternal Fehringer, the pupil’s choice.
But still, you know, some tattered remnant of my earlier self-respect still clung to my hunched shoulders. Rationalizations were all well and good, but something more was needed.
I was still living with Saundra at that time, and so I broached the subject to her that evening. I felt the need for a confidante, for someone to assure me that my choice was right and proper and good and beneficial, and that I could get away with it.
Saundra seemed, at the time, like the logical choice. She hated Madison Avenue so. Our nocturnal exertions were punctuated by manifestoes, our foreplay was fortified by foreign-born philosophies, our sex was ever seasoned with sociology.
According to Saundra, the capitalist society was a jungle, of the most primitive kind. For the individual in such a jungle, there were three choices open, three avenues of life: First, one could choose to be a timid tiny creature, with a burrow in which one hid from the ferociousness outside. Wage slaves and other roamers of the rutted routine were such stuff as timid tiny creatures were made on. Second, one could choose to be a lion or a panther, stalking the jungle, tearing from its richness whatever one could get. Financiers and Wall Street and Madison Avenue were panthers. Third, one could choose to be an eagle, and get the hell out of the jungle completely, by soaring above it all, swooping down into it only rarely for sustenance and otherwise wafting among the clods, thinking higher thoughts. Saundra and her unwashed friends were, if you could believe it, eagles.
According to Saundra, timid tiny creatures deserved everything they got, and in all justice were fit prey for panther and eagle alike. Panthers, on the other hand, were contemptible for their lack of intellectualism or morality, but were worthy of respect for their graceful ferocity. Eagles, of course, were the chosen few.
Saundra, I think, was never quite sure exactly what yours truly was. I lived more or less like a timid creature, but I had moments of aspiration toward pantherdom, and I seemed somehow able to converse with eagles on their own air.
In essence, therefore, I believed it reasonably safe to inform Saundra of my decision to join the ranks of panthers with one mighty bound upon the back of Tom Stanton. Her contempt for Stanton — for all advertising men who compounded their original sin by living in a commuter suburb — seemed to be sufficient to keep her away from any pity for the man. And her grudging respect for panthers should keep her at my side after the announcement was made.
I arrived at our den of iniquity — the term ‘pad’ was not at that time as yet hip, nor was the term ‘hip’—exhausted not from my labors but from my homewending, and over platters of Dinty Moore beef stew I told her of Philistine Fehringer’s proposition, and of my own decisions thereunto.
Alas, it only goes to show that one never knows women! At least not emancipated Bohemian women who have left the middle class behind but haven’t yet decided whether that makes them upper class or lower class. Saundra’s reaction to my disclosure was as violent as it was unexpected.
“Harvey, you don’t mean it? You’d — you’d stick a knife in the back of the man who befriended you? Who got you your job?”
“Well,” I said, “he is a lush.”
“That only proves,” she snapped back, “that he has a conscience. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a very delicate soul. Look at the way you two met. He came to you instantly because you didn’t have any shoes on.”
“So did the waiter,” I said.
“Don’t try to be funny, Harvey,” she said commandingly. “I think that’s a terrible thing. If I thought for one minute that the man to whose bosom I had—”
“And a lovely bosom it is,” I said.
“Don’t try to change the subject. Mr. Stanton was very good to you. How you could even think of—”
She went on and on that way. I had forgotten one important truth: Early upbringing remains behind, no matter how many logical or emotional over-lays are laminated on it. And had I ever mentioned that Saundra hailed originally from Doughboy, Nebraska? (If you don’t believe that such a place exists, friend, you just look it up in that miserable encyclopedia that smooth-talking door-to-door son-of-a-bitch sold you last year.) Way down beneath all the eagles and panthers and timid tiny creatures, Doughboy, Nebraska still burned in the heart of my raven-stressed Saundra. It was Doughboy that was talking now, not pinko sociology professors from Czechoslovakia. And Doughboy, it seemed, was just as long-winded as that other Saundra I had come to know and love so well.